She tells her father’s story in 23 chapters, each titled with a single word. The first, “Thwick,” the sound a cork makes when removed with a butterfly corkscrew, is four pages that occasionally crosses the line into wine porn. As is the case throughout the book, Ms. Fadiman embeds her father’s quotations and word selections into her own prose resulting in an exquisite father–daughter duet of premier grand cru writing. His essay, “Brief History of a Love Affair,” “contained a number of words (including ‘sybaritic,’ ‘connubial,’ and ‘consummation’)” (p. 4), as well as a title that under- standably misled her as the object of his affection. She “was grievously disappointed to discover…that the lover in question was not a woman but a liquid” (p. 4). She con- cludes that “Wine provided sensory pleasures equaled only by sex” (p. 8).

Clifton Fadiman’s love of wine comingled with his love of writing. With his friend and wine merchant, Sam Aaron, whom he called the “vintner of my discontent” (p. 110), he produced The Joys of Wine and The New Joys of Wine. The third chapter, “Wager,” tells a short story by fellow wine lover Roald Dahl called “Taste” that Fadiman liked so much he included it in the two wine anthologies. A father stakes the hand of his daughter against two houses in a bet with a guest who must identify a claret blind. He does so but is discovered to have cheated. As a side note, Ms. Fadiman shares the fact that Dahl had “once poured cheap wine into fancy bottles, served them to his unsuspecting guests, listened to them gush, and then revealed that they’d been snookered” (p. 12). This demonstration of neuro- economics foreshadows by decades the work of Plassmann et al. (2008).

Fadiman père lived in reaction to his humble beginnings in Brooklyn. He was born to nonreligious Jewish parents who immigrated to the United States and worked hard to assimilate including speaking English at home. Disgusted by their accent and poor grammar, he “learned English ‘as if it were Latin or Sanskrit,’ and devel- oped the hypercultured voice” (p. 20) that lent him an air of sophistication when he hosted the radio quiz show, Information Please, from 1938 to 1951 and various tele- vision shows later on.

In response to the anti-Semitism that prevailed at the time, Fadiman rejected any association with Judaism and nursed a sense of inferiority his entire life. Chapter 13, “Jew,” begins with a statement that Fadiman’s love of wine was in part due to the fact that it was not Jewish since Jews were not known to drink. “My father may have felt like an outsider in many aspects of his life, but when he drank wine with friends, he always belonged” (p. 228). His determination to pursue an academic career in liter- ature ran into a dead end when the head of Columbia University’s English depart- ment told him that “we have room for only one Jew” (p. 88) and he was not the one. Nevertheless, although he went on to a career in popularizing literature that made him more prosperous and much better known than the chosen one, he always felt he was out of place. Though he eschewed Yiddish and favored British, he still felt he was a fraud. Ms. Fadiman’s reaction to the self-alienation exhibited by her father and other Jewish writers is charitable: “whenever I have the urge to go back in time and tell them to knock it off, I remind myself that I don’t have a clue what they were up against and never will” (p. 84).